Business accelerator: perhaps just what the doctor ordered

Using a business accelerator to grow your business might be the wisest thing you could have chosen to do in a long time. But before we kick things off, a point has to be made. Don’t confuse a business incubator and a business accelerator. A business incubator will offer a common location for a number of fledgling businesses to work. More than services, they will offer the equipment you need and the networking and mentoring you need to get things off the floor. Most of these business incubators were linked to colleges and universities where these programs and facilities were instituted to try and encourage the growth of entrepreneurship.

But the late 90’s and the early part of the millennium changed all of that. To begin with, venture capitalists started to run business incubators so that they could organically grow companies that they could grow their money in. But by the turn of the millennium the bubble started to burst and these business incubators all vanished faster than you can say ‘Robinson Crusoe’. A business accelerator differs in one key respect; the momentum generated. Incubators allowed for slower growth rates. Business accelerators, as the name suggests, looked at producing rapid, intense growth.

Think of a business accelerator as boot camp for businesses, where all the fat is trimmed off and the business is whipped into shape in double quick time so that the business is running optimally in a matter of a few months. And as the business model for a business accelerator starts to make increasing sense, more accelerators will pop up on the scene. But most of these will not be funded by venture capitalists; they will be funded by angel investors, and that is a good thing. These angel investors will have experience in the business arena themselves and they can provide very precise, very meaningful guidance to these budding entrepreneurs. It is hard to say whether business accelerators are the real deal or not. But if something is encouraging industry and entrepreneurship, surely it can’t be a bad thing. America was founded on the principles of chasing your dreams, and this is just a natural extension of that.